Virtual Physical Reality With Kintinuous And An Oculus Rift

Combining the Kinect 3D realtime mapping with Oculus Rift 3D Goggles. This is pretty darned amazing. This is going to have huge applications in the Augmented Reality world. Can you imagine? Just do a 3D scan of the space, let the Kinect do the mapping, then pull the whole model into the Oculus Rift environment, and then you can start marking up/overlaying whatever objects, info, data that you want within that model. The more time it takes Oculus Rift to be released and marketed, the more potential applications people seem to invent for it.

[Thomas] and his fellow compatriots within the Kintinuous project are modeling an office space with the old XBox 360 Kinect’s RGB+D sensors. then using an Oculus Rift to inhabit that space. They’re not using the internal IMU in the Oculus to position the camera in the virtual space, either: they’re using live depth sensing from the Kinect to feed the Rift screens.

While Kintinuous is very, very good at mapping large-scale spaces, the software itself if locked up behind some copyright concerns the authors and devs don’t have control over. This doesn’t mean the techniques behind Kintinuous are locked up, however: anyone is free to read the papers (here’s one, and another, PDF of course) and re-implement Kintinuous…